


Mr. In-Between

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: Pasiphaë and the Bull [4]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon - Comics, F/M, Gen, M/M, sexual jealousy, weird sexist gender bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 20:26:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2886419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To get what you want, you make sacrifices.  Sometimes, sacrifices make you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. In-Between

**Author's Note:**

> Sofia Falcone comes from "The Long Halloween", by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Of which I sort of spoiled part of the plot. Read it, anyway. The title of this story comes from the song, "Accentuate the Positive", by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

He throws a chair against the wall. It isn't his chair, and it isn't his wall. The man tied to another chair, this one not in flight, starts. The other men, the ones who work for him, fidget, but say or do nothing else.  
“I don't know what got into me,” Oswald laughs, straightens his jacket. “I've just been so short-tempered, lately. Does that ever happen to you? Do you ever just get annoyed- not at anything in particular, but just sort of generally?”  
The man doesn't answer. No one does. “It's all right. You don't have to say anything. It's okay to just listen. I actually know what's bothering me,” he confides, leaning closer, “It's just a little personal problem. I know everything's going to be all right, but it's so hard waiting for the inevitable conclusion. It's not that I think anything could go wrong. I just get so,” he shrugs, “Impatient.” Oswald picks up a knife from the table. “Thank you so much for listening. You've been a big help.”

Of course, it's come to this. Who else could truly understand? And he wants to be understood. Wants it so badly.  
“Oh, God!” she gasps, puts her hand up to her mouth.  
“Nope- just me!” he says and smiles.  
“Why are you here?” Her voice is the sound of an old house, creaks and groans from a decaying shell.  
He frowns. “I wanted to talk.”  
Her shoulders fall. “But I've already told you everything I know.”  
“No, no. Not about that. Can we sit down? I've been on my feet all day, and I'm sure you could use a rest, too.”  
Liza frowns, but motions toward the kitchen table. They sit.  
“This is so nice,” Oswald says. In this light, especially, she looks like shit, haggard and used-up, but he can't say that. “You're looking well.”  
“Thank you,” she mutters.  
“How is everyone treating you?”  
“Well.”  
“I've been meaning to ask you,” he holds up a hand, “and you mustn't jump to the obvious conclusion, because you're a lovely girl, but you just don't interest me in that way- are you romantically involved with Fish? Or with Falcone? Or with both?”  
“Why do you want to know that?”  
“I just want to know.”  
She narrows her eyes. “I think you already know the answer.”  
“You're right. I do. We can skip that part. How do you do it?”  
“How do we- What? I'm not going to tell you that.”  
“No, no. I don't want to know details. I want to know how you keep your emotions separate from your job.”  
“It's just a job,” she says and shrugs. “I don't- it's not about that.”  
“With Falcone, surely. But what about with Fish?”  
“That's different.”  
“Different, how?”  
“She-” Liza looks down, then up, fixes his eyes with hers, until it's he who has to look away, “She takes care of me.”  
“So, you feel as though you owe her.”  
“No. She takes care of me, and I want to take care of her, too.”  
“Ah.”  
“I know I can't-” she rolls her eyes, “I know I can't change her. I know I can't make her feel the same way about me, because she can't know what it's like.”  
Oswald frowns. “Can't know what what's like?”  
“She can't know what it's like to be that weak. To need someone so badly. She has everything. Not just, like, money, but she has everything she needs, inside of her. I don't have any of that.”  
“But doesn't it make you resent her?” he wrinkles his nose, “Even a little bit?”  
“No.” Liza shakes her head. “Why would it?”  
“Because she has so much power over you. Not just the power of life and death, but emotional power.”  
“Isn't that love, though?”  
He doesn't usually hit women, but he really, really wants to hit Liza, just then. The impulse is alien, invasive, and its lack of connection to anything he's aware of feeling disturbs him. It's okay to lose control, but you need to know why you're losing control. He puts his hands in his lap.  
It's like she knows that he's unraveling, because she says in her tough little voice, “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”  
“What do you do when you have something all planned out, and you know what you're going to do, almost down to the second, to get what you want, but out of nowhere, something impossible happens? Do you just abandon all of your potential,” he holds up his hands, “greatness? Do you give up everything you've worked for, just for- for what? For an illusion, for something that was never supposed to be real, that you don't even want to be real? Because it's so horrible, and, and disgusting.”  
“What the hell are you talking about?”  
“I can't tell you.”  
“Okay.” Suddenly, she sounds even younger than she actually is, a bratty teenager, still years away from anything that carried any weight and could possibly make an imprint on her life. “If it's disgusting, stop doing it.”  
“I can't stop.”  
“Is it, like, your job?”  
“Yes. I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't my job, but I like it too much to stop, anyway.”  
“Then, what's so bad about it?”  
“I'm not supposed to do things like this. I'm supposed to be great.”  
“You can't be great and do whatever you want to do?”  
“No.”  
“But if you're so powerful, why can't you just do whatever the hell you want to? Isn't that the whole point?”  
Liza must be some kind of secret genius. He tells her. He laughs. “Thank you.”  
“You're welcome?”  
“No, really. Thank you.” He rises. “And if you tell anyone about this, I'll kill you. I mean, really horribly. And they'll never find your body. You have a good night. I can see myself out.”

It's just a slight alteration to his plans. No one needs to know. He doesn't want anyone to know. His original plans were secret, but now, he almost has to keep secrets from himself. It's too much to admit it. It's too ridiculous. It's almost obscene. Just the barest edge of the thought, brushing his mind like a fallen eyelash, makes him feel like he's bubbling over inside. Each day, he wakes, hoping that he's changed his mind; that he slept it off. He's never sure if the mornings when he wakes alone are easier or harder to bear.  
“You go out too much,” his mother says.  
“I have to, Mom. It's for work.” Every so often, they have this conversation, almost verbatim. Sometimes, he's sure that she knows, and that she's just working her way up to confronting him, but that isn't really her style.  
“You stink of cigarette smoke,” she says, folds her arms over her chest.  
“That's from the restaurant.”  
“Why do you have to stay out all night?”  
“There are things to do, after we close. I help with the accounting, and the orders, and I supervise clean-up and re-stocking, and-”  
As she often does, she softens abruptly, like a souffle falling. “I know you work hard. I just worry about you being out there at night.”  
“I'm not on the street; I'm in a building,” which is not a lie, “Nothing's going to happen to me inside.”  
“Sleeping all day isn't healthy.”  
“I know, Mom, but this is a good job. I worked hard to get it.”  
“I know. I know.”  
“I have to go, now.”  
“Did they send a car for you again?” she asks, clasping her hands together and smiling.  
He goes to the window. “You can see for yourself.” He draws back the curtain.  
“So nice,” she murmurs.  
“Someday, I'll take you for a ride with me.”  
“Oh,” she waves her hand, “I don't like it out there. There's nothing I need to see. Just be safe. And be a good boy.”  
He assures her that he will, and he goes downstairs, and leaves the building, and as soon as he's out of her sight, he lights a cigarette and sighs.

People are envious. He's known that all his life. From the time that he was a boy, his mother always told him that he was exceptional, that it showed, and that people would make his life difficult because they resented their own mediocrity. If he's being perfectly honest, there have been times when he doubted her, but experience has taught him that she knows much more than she might seem to at first.  
Exceptional people can do whatever they want. He always knew it; it just took someone unexceptional to remind him. Of course, Liza would know this; being on the outside, she can see things so much more clearly.  
Oswald knows about being on the outside. It's where he usually is. It's where he needs to be. You can't trust people to gather information for you; you can use them, but you can only really trust yourself. And he sees something, now.  
It's Maroni, with a woman. She's what they used to call a handsome woman- not pretty. She isn't delicate; she's solidly-built, but regal, like a Romanesque church. Her hair is concealed by a scarf, and she wears sunglasses, which just accentuates her prominent nose, the severe angle of her chin, her cruel cheekbones. Her coloring is far darker than his, but Oswald still has the very surreal impression that he's seeing an approximation of what he'd look like as a woman. He has to look away, so he turns his ear toward them, and listens to Maroni whisper something to her. He doesn't catch any of the actual words, except for the last one, a name: Sofia. Is that who she is? And why does that name sound familiar to him? He should know. He shouldn't have to look at his notes to remember all of the information he's gathered.  
“I need you to keep that under your hat,” Maroni says to him, later.  
“What do you mean?”  
Maroni smiles. “That's good. Don't even let on to me that you know.”  
Oswald lets his face go blank. “All right.” He waits to be told something else, but there is nothing else.

The cars still come to pick him up, but they only take him to and from work.

Sofia is Sofia Falcone Gigante, nee Sofia Falcone. Daughter of Carmine Falcone. Oswald doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry or to scream. Some kind of reaction is needed, but he doesn't know which one, because he doesn't know what this means. Of course, it's good for him, because everything is good for him, because his triumph is inevitable. Right now, though, what does this mean? Other than the fact that he's been sleeping alone for the past three weeks. Spending time at bars so that he still comes home late, so that his mother won't question the change in his schedule. He drinks too much, and he smokes too much; he's been losing weight, and he hasn't been getting enough sleep. Suddenly, his position seems a lot more precarious; he'd never considered what might happen if Maroni stopped wanting him. When it was happening, in the pith of the action, it had seemed like the end would be a relief. No more negotiation between what was expected of him and what he was willing to do. No more concealment. No more feeling.  
The feeling doesn't end. It just changes. It becomes bitter. Humiliatingly, he has to pretend not to care. Before, he had to pretend to care until he actually began to, and now, he has to pretend to not care, when he does. So very much. Of course, he always knew that it wasn't for him, that he was a prop, that he was there to play a part, and he still is. It's more insulting, now, somehow; he has to pretend to be all right with this. With Maroni carrying on with this usurper, this hussy- and now, he thinks he understands why his mother knows so many synonyms for 'whore' in a language other than her own.  
“Mom, tell me about Dad.”  
“I told you everything, already. He was an important man. He helped to bring me here, but he couldn't come, himself, because he would have been missed.”  
“Why didn't you stay there with him? Why didn't you get married?”  
She sighs. “He was already married. His parents forced him, when he was young. She was a witch, this woman he was married to. She mistreated him, flaunted her affairs. So, it was inevitable that he would seek comfort with someone else.”  
“What if-” God, how does he word this?- “What if you did everything right, but he still looked at somebody else?”  
“Men are like that,” she snorts, “Not you, of course, but most men. Men get bored. They don't know what a good thing is. They want excitement. They always think they can find it from the next woman. All women are the same, though. We're small creatures, with small lives. We can offer small comfort. What does a man think he'll find, with any of us? But a man always wants big things, thinks that the next time, it'll be different.”  
“What if-” oh, God help him- “he's a man who likes other men?”  
She's quiet for a moment. “Then, he's lucky,” she says, finally, “He'll never be disappointed, and he'll never disappoint anyone. He'll make them sad, especially if he's attractive to women, but he won't hurt women. Not like that.”  
“What if he likes men and women?”  
She laughs. “Then, everyone needs to watch out. Is this someone you know?”  
“Yeah,” he says, smooths down hair that isn't sticking up, “Someone at the restaurant. I heard some of the staff talking.”  
“Oh. Well, don't involve yourself in these things. It doesn't become you.”  
“No, I don't. I just do my job.”  
“I know you do. You're such a good boy.” He lets her fuss over him a bit, and then, he goes to his room, and thinks.

“Hello. I was in the neighborhood, and I just thought I'd stop by.”  
Liza waves like a young palm in the breeze on her high heels. “Are you drunk?”  
He snorts. “Don't be ridiculous.” He takes out his cigarettes, and lights one.  
“You can't smoke in here,” she hisses.  
He makes another dismissive sound. She sighs, and gets a saucer for him to use as an ashtray.  
“Why are you here?”  
“I wanted to ask you...”  
“What?”  
“I wanted to ask you how you did it.”  
She folds her arms over her chest. “Did what?” she huffs.  
“How did you make him love you?”  
“I don't know that I did.”  
“But you're there, in his house. He takes care of you, he trusts you.”  
“That doesn't mean that he loves me. Sometimes, men just like having you around, like a nice painting. They might treat you all right, but it doesn't mean that they love you.”  
He knows that she means 'you', generally, but the word still makes him start.  
“How do you- I mean, how would a woman- make a man who'd fallen out of love with her fall back in love with her?”  
Liza shakes her head. “You can't make a person love you. They either do, or they don't.”  
He frowns. “I think you can. You can make a person feel things he didn't want to, didn't even know were possible.”  
She sighs. “I don't know about that. If someone's not already interested, you can't make them interested. If you feel something, it's because it's already in you.”  
“I don't think that's true.”  
She shrugs. “Fine.”  
“I need you to tell me everything you can about this woman.” He takes out a picture of Sofia. It's a surveillance photo, but of good quality; you get the full impact of how truly striking she is. Does it hurt more or less, being thrown over for a formidable woman?  
Liza looks at the photo. “You know who this is, don't you?”  
“Of course, I do. Why wouldn't I?”  
“Okay.”  
“I want to know about her comings and goings. I want to know who she's seen with. I want to know who she talks to.”  
“Fine.”  
“Oh, don't look so glum,” he says, “It's not like you care about these people. And what's Fish going to do? This can't hurt her. Cheer up- you're doing a good deed.”

Gently, very gently, he puts it out there that somebody knows that Sofia has been seeing Maroni. Not anyone in particular, but somebody. If somebody knows, then somebody else might find out. After that, he's dying to hear about it from Maroni. He may actually be dying, he thinks. He feels his heart spasming in his chest. He's smoking more than ever, and when he's not smoking, he's eating; a psychiatrist could surely make a lot of this constant need to have something in his mouth. Nothing sits right with him, though, so he walks around in a haze of light nausea. The only time he doesn't drink is when he's at work. He loses track of time, and forgets to sleep.  
Finally, Maroni says, with leisurely regret: “It's gotten a little too hot for me and my lady friend.”  
“Oh, who's that?” Oswald asks.  
“The woman you saw me with, that day.”  
“Oh, what a shame. So, you broke up?”  
“No, no. We're just going to need to be more careful. We can't see each other as often.”  
“Well, I'm very sorry.”  
“Why?” Maroni smiles, “It's not your fault.”  
“No. Of course not...”  
His mother's always told him about the natural inconstancy of men. If he stops seeing her as often, Oswald knows, he'll change his mind. He'll forget why he cared so much about her. Oswald just has to wait, and to continue to play his hand lightly. Those are the two things he's best at.

Of course, he's rewarded. Maroni must inevitably come around. To see that no woman, no matter how attractive, could do for him what Oswald does. His mother's right: women are small, and lead small lives; men will always want more. Oswald's mistake was to try to behave like a woman; to think that he could keep a man with his body. It never should have occurred to him; he's not beautiful. It's his mind that he needs to use. The thing that makes him so much better than everyone else. Maroni, included.  
Sometimes, you need to humiliate yourself a little. To accomplish something important. And you need to make sacrifices. To get your way. He knows that it's too soon to play this card, and he almost feels bad for Liza, who he's condemning to God knows what fate. At the hands of a betrayed Falcone, a wrathful Fish, or even an amused Maroni. She should have just called his bluff. Even he didn't really think that Falcone would have believed him; Oswald knows that he can come off as paranoid. But that's what happens when you're afraid, and you let it show: people give you something to really fear.  
They're back at the suite. What at first seemed odd and cold to Oswald is seeming more and more homey. This is the kind of place where he belongs. They're having a drink. Oswald is smoking a cigarette. He had to buy a holder; he didn't want his mother to see the nicotine stains on his fingers. Of course, Maroni thinks it's terribly funny, but Oswald doesn't mind being laughed at. Just this once.  
“It's nice to have you back here,” Maroni says warmly.  
“I'm glad to be back,” says Oswald.  
Then he shows Maroni how glad he is. In the sitting room, and again in the bedroom.  
He missed this. He missed it being this way. A role for him to play. Something he can put some art into. And, now, he's never been better suited to play it. Now that he knows how good it can be. And how it can make you feel like you'd die from the pain. He lets it show. Sighs and moans and moves as though in agony. He holds on tightly to Maroni, digs in his fingernails, kisses him feverishly.  
“You missed me,” Maroni says.  
“You know I did,” Oswald says, letting himself sound a little bit hurt.  
“Yeah, I know.”  
Later, Oswald says, “But I stayed busy. While you were away.”  
“How did you stay busy?”  
Oswald turns onto his side, facing Maroni, lets the sheets slip down his hip. “I learned things.”  
“Like what?”  
“Well...” Oswald frowns, bites his lip,“If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to do anything about it? To keep it to yourself until I tell you that it's time to act?”  
“It sounds like it's one hell of a secret.”  
Oswald smiles. “Oh, it is.”


End file.
